Moving from Halloween to running, I wanted to blog about what it’s like to “bonk” or hit the wall while running a marathon. I’m a slow runner. Hell, I’m a slow walker. I consider it a great marathon if I finish in just under five hours. This past weekend at the Morgan Hill marathon, I bit off more than I could chew.
The morning of the race, I saw a pacer who would be running the race in four hours and forty minutes. Pacers are cool: they actually carry little signs on wooden sticks that say “4:40″ or whatever. I thought “Hey, why not try to do this race in 4:40 instead of 5 hours? If I get tired, I’ll just slow down and fall back.” That was my first mistake.
My second mistake was forgetting that Morgan Hill has 400 feet of hill climbing in the first half of the marathon. To finish a marathon in four hours and forty minutes, you would need to maintain a pace of about 10 minutes and 40 seconds per mile, or 10:40. Running a 10:40 mile while climbing uphill is very different from running a 10:40 mile on flat ground.
The running pacer did a great job of keeping our little group of 4-5 people on a solid 10:40 gait even up the hills. Heading toward the final hill, we were even ahead of our overall 4:40 goal by about a minute. But I’d been pushing faster than I preferred to go (at one point dropping below a ten minute mile), and I’d been running up hills for half a marathon.
Just as we started to head up the final hill after mile 14, I bonked. I tracked the race with my Garmin 620 watch, and you can see what it looked like on these graphs:
In the top graph, you can see that I kept a steady, consistent pace until about 14 miles in. The middle graph is the elevation–even as we climbed 400 feet, the pace stayed pretty constant. Then you can see my collapse. My pace dropped off sharply. In the bottom graph, you can see how my cadence alternated between walking and jogging. I was lucky enough to find a friend for the last three miles of the race, and you can see my walking cadence sped up as we walked, jogged, and visited for the tail end of the race.
I might still be able to do a flat race at 4:40. And I might be able to do a hilly race at my previous best of ~5 hours. But attempting to run a hilly race in 4:40? That was too much for me that day.
So I got to see what it felt like to hit the wall, and it wasn’t fun. Instead of gradually running slower, I felt like I needed to walk to catch my breath. When I started running again, no matter how slowly I ran, my heart rate quickly spiked back up and I soon had to take another walking break. It was pretty humbling. The Morgan Hill marathon isn’t as tough as Whiskey Row (now that looks like a tough race!), but it was hard enough for me.
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